Adalbertstraße, 54-65.

I look for you in the clouds of smoke clogging my mind, but you're behind them.

In a city unfit for the hypersensitive, I lose my sight in the colors, I lose my hearing in the noise, and I lose you in the crowd and maybe I find you again. I hope I never have to find myself again.

Submerged by the Metropolis, in equilibrium; in the belly of the wave yet still quite in place, comes and goes the light. And between its flickers, you see us: the beautiful minds shining so bright for a moment or so until they burn out, on a second-floor balcony and nothing can stop us now—maybe later. No one can hurt us now—maybe never. Talks about emptiness and how fulfilling it is to be human. Talks about Heaven and how to escape Hell with minimal effort. Our hopes explode and we scatter then huddle under the rubble; like a First World War and rebuild, a Second World War and rebuild, a fall of a wall and the disintegration of all things red. And if Bowie thought we could be heroes, who are we to disagree?

So we stain the streets with our presence, like the outlanders we are. We leave our trace on every other building and I hope to God it resembles your smile. You give up pieces of yourself in us: from bare heads to pierced faces, from tatted arms to tattered steps and loud laughs and dreams that repeat like broken records, going on record to prove they should linger and they should prevail. From here to infinity, there will be a you in all of us.

Yet to describe you is to push faith unto the heathen. I would tire my tongue and leave the most bittersweet of tastes in my mouth trying to dress you in the perfect words yet I would remain a criminal without an ounce of justice in my system. I would work my brain around anything else but you, but you are omnipresent in my being; my heart and my soul.

But at your core, you are just a city welcoming all; picture, motion, sound. And as such, we will always reside; leaving residue of our geists in the stomach of the beast. In the middle of Berlin.

The wooden floor under my bed tremors. My pillow vibrates. I lie still in my place, try to sleep. Please don’t give me dreams. It might as well be the end of the world but I’m not getting up any time soon. I’m probably making it up. If it’s all for real, do you feel it too? It all leads back to you.

I haven’t left my bed in a week and an earthquake is not going to change that. Mother Nature gave no shit about my pain so why should I care about hers? Think of it as a migraine and you’re on a stop light. 30 seconds or you die. You don’t let it make you cry. You don’t even have a cry face; you just tear up, shut an eye and move on with your day. It all leads back to you. But I. Am. Not. Moving.

The neighbors start screaming. Why must they screech their throats in search for a prayer? I haven’t spoken a word all day. The sound of bare feet hitting the concrete, they’re running away for good. The streets are going to swallow them whole. I can’t take the roars of panic searing outside my door. Good thing I can block the noise. Where are you?

I turn to my other side. I see nothing but the fading white of a wall. It keeps me company. There’s a sense of comfort knowing only one of us will survive this break of routine. I almost laugh and it almost returns me the favor.

I think the electricity died first, no TV sound in the background. And then the waterlines. Are you thirsty? I can smell the dusk but it should be noon by now.

I love this; the most action I’ve had in twenty years and it’s destructive. Nature is a queen in her rage and she’s claiming back her land, pronouncing us nomads—again. And this time too we have no say in it. Are you wearing shoes? The world is in flames but this is my own tiny heaven. It even has the iridescence of the faithful and the damned. Are you still here?

I pull my head under the sheets; maybe this makeshift veil will keep you from slithering stealthily into my minute place of bliss. I want to enjoy the moment. The walls are closing in, literally. I am eaten. My body is a mess. My skull crushed. I don’t even get to finish my last thou…

Pitch black, over the clouds, smoke and life.

Are you still alive?

I have both dreams and nightmares of normalcy.
A nice husband who isn’t around for most of the life we’ve shared together, four kids whose ages he isn’t familiar with, but says he just can’t care to remember. A first-floor apartment overlooking a side street. Kids are playing and I make lunch on a quiet Friday afternoon. In my dreams, I am not half the bad cook I am.
I snap out of it at 3 in the morning, I’ve always been wondering why we insist on calling it “morning” when the sun hasn’t even risen yet. And when Momma asks me what’s wrong, I tell her tales of an international space station where strawberries have gone extinct a couple of years after the apocalypse.
I don’t know anything at all, and perhaps that is one of the two things that I know for sure. The other, is the fact that I was doomed to a life of consistent contradictions. No—not the head over heart kind of contradiction, but what if I was to rise with the notion that I’ve caved in to the monotone I used to despise a little bit too much? What if our parents too spoke with such urgency that it was hard for their friends to keep up? What if we found out that the spark in our eyes is genetic, only to discover later that every fire eventually dies out, no matter how persistent and frantic?
I spend my days hiding behind a mellow nothingness that drapes like curtains my mind, and my nights tiring the glaring sun screaming bloody murder in my resting ears till it swears not to rise any more.
One morning, I wake from some dreamless sleep, easy on the mind and heavy on the soul; ordinary in every way the lives we lead are. My mother does not bear to ask what the hell is wrong with me. Instead, she cradles my head in her lap. She prays for me as I nap for what feels like a minute but actually lasts a few hours. She thinks me someone whose idea of forever has been the temporary tattoo of the word “believe” fading on my arm. And God knows how she pities me. Only I know how I pity myself, and I hate that.

I burn my lungs for fun. I tell myself there is nothing for me in rebirth, only in decay. When I was a kid, I would build airplanes out of Lego bricks, I would stand up on top of a chair, a thud and a clatter later, my plane's shattered and pieces are flowing on the floor. I knew it wouldn’t fly, I could calculate the gravity force on any mass when I was five, but still I hoped physics would make just this one exception, just for me. We all lie to ourselves, but only a truly desperate person starts to believe those lies.
I wake up the following morning and I’m no longer five; suddenly I’m seventeen. I’ve somehow been able to convince myself that time was something I could take, borrow and give. I tell you I’ll give you all the time that I have, like that’s actually mine. You politely decline, telling me that yes, we are two good people, but yes, we only ever manage to bring the bad out of each other. The look on your face, it is as if space-time exists only in a universe we declared our own and now it is doomsday but nobody cares because nobody’s alive to tell.
When the person that keeps you grounded decides to let go or alternatively loses anything resembling balance, you don’t launch like a rocket ship into space, instead you freefall into a destiny we all know, an end we’re all familiar with: the sequel for life—or so I’d hope, the stillness and the solitude that grace death. So what if you lose your breath and no one’s there to catch it? You recollect yourself, rearrange untruths until they become facts that boom and bloom sanctity in sanctuary for a livelihood or a few.
The only two feelings that can possess a being are loneliness and hope. I’m helpless and I'm plagued by them both. I pray that either one is strong enough to end the other. Prayer can’t help the infidel. So I stand on my tiptoes, on the padded seat of a chair; my glare to the loneliness, my back to the hope, thinking to myself, this is no way to go live. There is no way I’m living what’s left of my life like this: lost and losing it, and losing big chunks of myself with every step I take, with every mistake I make. I’m hiding when I just want to be found, be it by you or by my own. I have stopped caring a long time ago, back when I learned that it was too late for me to find a flaw in Newton’s law of universal gravitation.

IV.

I love the fresh rush of rebirth in my veins when I pour water down my throat and it rains into the open sea that is my stomach. Maybe the butterflies can swim, but I’ve learnt that they also migrate to the brain and give migraines that spread and pulse and barely touch the insides of the ribcage, that spread and throb and eventually clot all within the flutter of a butterfly’s wings.

And I’ve learnt that the most violent of thoughts is that that starts in the head like a cell and descends slowly and smoothly to the heart. Lethally cancerously and quietly, a thought reaches way farther than its destination.

Sometimes I am so disconnected from the world. It feels like life is a boring movie I’m only watching out of curiosity of what is going to happen next. Some other times I am one with Earth: air, ground, trees. I can hear the roots digging through soil. And I coil into myself and swear to God I love it so much. Even if always faltering between two opposite emotions leaves me exhausted and begging for silence and the mere bliss of rest.

And I love my body. I love how in control I am of my body even if my fingers linger to move to their own accord when I’m nervous and I can’t afford to be nervous above the surface of my clothes.

I control my body the way I would want to command my thoughts to retreat to their base in the back of my mind. This war isn’t theirs to fight. This war is mine. And it won’t stop until a truce is conducted to lay down the tension between the head and the heart. It won’t stop until my head and my heart decide to condense the area of condescension between them to null.

I have waited for (almost) everyone to share their opinion/rage/joke over the Leila situation, and now, because I like to imagine that 1/7,000,000,000 is not that close to zero, I would like to share my thoughts:
1. A couple of weeks ago I found one of my old poems. The poem was written on September 15th 2013, the day after Leila’s concert, but just like a great portion of what I write about—what I am all about, it was about this city. I love and care about my country and my city way more than they do about me.
2. In my life, I have purchased three tickets for three different concerts of Leila's, and I have been counting my teenage years in respect to the only one that I used.
3. One of my favorite things about my generation is how hopefully angry it is. But there exists a deep ideological gap within my generation. There are the internet slacktivists and the still ones; only moving a little backwards thinking they’re swimming against the tide. The problem is that we have never learnt to think for ourselves.
4. The thing is, the entire deal only managed to make Leila more (in)famous. And while I don’t know whether that’s a bad thing or good, the band has now gained martyr status: congratulations.
5. It was never about the concert, but rather about what is going to come next. I can only wait with cautious anticipation.
6. There is a conspiracy theory that basically states that when something major is about to hit the news, a less significant event happens to avert the public’s attention.
7. Thank you, Leila, for being the soundtrack for some of my existential crises.
8. I pray that my generation gets its own voice some time soon. 

0.
I wear Venus around my neck, so I am blessed by the strength of seven women and the pride of seven more:
I.
She’s kneeling down, kneading the earth under her feet, begging for light, trying to stare straight into the sun on the hottest day of the year and not once blink. (This is how you make her feel)
Moonshine is a bloodbath by the time it reaches the shoreline.
IV.
She’s asleep as if the only way out is to close your eyes and pretend you’re out. Pretend it’s over. Like there isn’t a baby crying on your lap, no world sipping down your shoulders, and heaven is not under your feet.
The sky is a deathbed for all her dreams, yet still, she peaks above her head.
II.
She went to the place where the city is a sea of lights and the mountains are waves and seven waves are not enough to swipe her off her feet. She was swept off her feet without even trying.
Stole a pocketful of love from contraband, a fast car that doesn’t get out of town
Bringing truth back to this dead town
Putting on the night like a gown
And dancing to the lightning.
V.
Model daughter and later model citizen. Nothing interesting.
VI.
A mother. She has a way of dealing with trouble: she doesn’t deal with trouble.
But mother, here I am; child, daughter, trouble,
please don’t deal with me
I do not exist.
I do not exist.
I do not exist.
Mother's drowning in the fountain of youth.
III.
She knew better than to miss with someone with Spring in their heart, so she brought Winter back to hers. It weighs her down, yes, but that’s better than sinking in a sea of fear and responsibility.
No but really, he had an electric smile
She had an iron heart
Built with one too many walls
And no fire escape.
Arson, darling.
VII.
“Is this how you honor the living?”
“ No, this is how you honor your honor.”
A bullet planted in her head
Growing like the tree of death
A crimson sunset lingering before the full moon
Finally
The devil ascended announcing truce.

for the forest in which too many were lost but only a few made it out alive

(This is for eyes as clear as Spring and as cold as Winter)


I have traded my excitement for poetry; for spirit can only wander much until spirit sobers up.


Galaxies away, yet they’re stealing my Sun. There’s something pretty about It rising every hour, but darkness isn’t always sad; only cautious. That’s all.


This is how oblivion works: there’s a storm on the surface of your moon and I can’t hear it. I can’t pull the tide away from the shores of your heart, but I can try and sink the craft, until we sail home, to the clouds. Fly not, for wings melt but sails do not.


The clouds: far away and high.


Dawn is cold and dry.


Still, I have a hope for a midnight sky filled to the brim with stars whose iridescence would fuse fantasies to the lead in your veins.


I think I saw Heaven glistening in your brain. I kept telling myself that the trip to Heaven was worth the fall. Tell me it was worth the fall.


Somedays, it feels like the back of your mind is broken. Like I am going to jump back into nothingness if you don’t mend it with days lost to a future far away from now.


I have swallowed so much pride, it’s making me sick. It makes me sick that I have the courage for you but not for me. That I live for you but not for me. 


That it doesn’t seem to make that much of a difference because not two forevers are exactly the same.

Existential Crisis

You close your eyes and think particles are blind, you shut your mouth and act deaf. You exist; you are in a room that is. There is a universe in your mind. There is a supernova on your neck. Necked from the Big Bang. There is a black hole in your lisp. In your speech, space fulminates. In your spine, mortals live and mortals die. Stars illuminate inside your chest. 

Manumitted by a first breath, life injected in the cells; behold lessening the jolts. Behold learning the crypts.

You swim. You land. You eject a second breath. Tattooing fingerprints on your children's foreheads. And then you walk, carving footprints on the seabed for meteorites to trace. 

We found hearts in a cleft. The clefts made a stream. The streams we wrecked, until our shadows became streaks. Conversed by smiles that spoke of engravers. We felt what no other creature could feel; tribe is safety, hunt is stability, loss is thirst. Home is circular and beasts are slaves.

We fought over land and game but still you remained under my skin —in the bones: free radical, wild and intangible, unrooted and disputant. I hinged on the mountains and you left like a fortune teller with not much for a luck. Floating on self-destruct. Traded your crystal ball with the globe, books with papercuts, lovers with stains. Loaded your pen-pencil with leads, and wrote me mechanical.

My people wandered Earth for water, and gulped down the seaside. My people are seasick. My people, their knees bleed on the plants lurking in the sunrise. My people, they shred the lands, wondering whose good is better. But only you know that insistence is good enough and resistance can keep you alive.

The world is our playground: valleys are slides when destruction is erupted. A tide is grace if you keep from drowning. Glazed eyes fool what the mind can already feel.

You are a billet for bullets lost and dutiful.

And it's beautiful how foggy and misprinted your eyes can be. And it struck me that you were as oblivious as I thought you would be. But blueprints cannot be read by no expert.

My alibi is all that I've been dreaming of; angels doing handstands and bobbing their heads to punk rock and that was nowhere near healthy. And I might be guilty for the emptiness inside me but yeah whatever.

The sun heat is like waking up to shrapnel and duds in your bed.

My problem is that you are my own presence. And I can't be there without you roaming my spectrum. All I think of is influenced by all I think of you.

These days, you cross my mind like any simple thought, even though I thought we weren't supposed to think about each other anymore.

You were never able to stain me; you just taught me to say what I think and scribe what you say. You turned my day into night while the night was still a night and you promised me an armor that would bring the Sun to its feet. And that we'd flee this world whenever our chances was to clear out of this dome and pray that our friends would pray for us too.

But you are not like your friends and I am not like my friends and I don't know why we insist on calling them friends when obviously they would leave us alone with our migraines under the steamy sand that stand for the dirt we've racketed.

The soil that is lavished with its generosity to give birth to trees that can only converse with the rain. There's a reason trees don't grow near the sea.

It is all a ballad of shaky handshakes and sweaty palms holding unto each other like flood and pulse is the ark. 

People like us pretend to wear their pride like dignity that hangs on rooftops and trips on full stops.

Hands like yours remain like photographs which remind me that my forever is just not yours and that we both are finite.

Right then, I knew I was breathless but I was lunging. I was longing, for a walk that could calm me down but could also keep me ignited because peace was drifting and I didn't want to drift away from myself.

But now? Right now, I feel so little. And so young. And so naive. But I am little. I am young. And I am naive. I stress my words where my worlds end: when I just can't speak, even if I try to sugarcoat all what I've written.

So, I stop writing. And I clear my throat, ready for something I'm unprepared for. And so it is attacked and it's gouged by the ticking of my wristwatch.

This is how to live when it's the possibilities that guide you to where you belong.

Pulp;

I have found sainthood within you.

You conquer my voice, even though it dances to the shivering of my fingers. The universe slows movement in each of your syllables and you leave me shaken, waiting for explanations. And I don't know what to expect.

I lock myself in for a moment or two, counting the seconds before you become my first, having no excuse; only scenarios as they wrap around our necks. But I'm the one losing breath.

I have found poetry in your guitar strings.

Ink-printed notes, muffled behind standing ovation, yet you still are a play.

And if bobby pens were voyagers, they would've made it to so-called villages, rumbled inside waves like duplicates of the sun rays, illuminating knots as they are. Your shoulder blades would've been shorelines and then fullstops.

Darling, we must be shattered enough to convulse Atlas off our berm

And we must be shattered enough

To scatter the children of bedlam for nameless skeletons. With bony toes that still curl platforms; this is one of three deadly things the dead can feel. The other two being rebirth and dirt.

There are too many wishbone bridges to carry a city of friability and to fill in blanks, wreckage for river banks. 

And then you speak flat notes fleeing opera house.

I have found pavements in your footprints.

This is how to find a way out with a broken compass.

This is how I bypass my base because I'm so easily triggered; my arms are rifles and, to my surprise, I carry bullets. 

Throwing stones from a glass door is the revolution sealing your backbone shut.

Secrets occupy the heart, rumors flow in the student body.

Beauty is learnt to exist like desired destruction, insisting on decaying like rubble that once built monuments for moments I used to count.

I am bound to be your angst-driven, self-indulgent lullaby.

I have found night watch circling your wrist instead of wristwatch.

Cremate me and scribe my ashes then scrub off the dust. Because home is the brutality in honesty which strengthens your temples. 

I am restless between elbows, I bow to never finish writing our closure, as I am trying to capture what's always vivid, and maybe this is why I am a flailing failing photographer.

After all, serendipities do no good to sirens. And you are the mess I regret creating and cleaning up.

I speak in the most improper of languages, but if you don't have a breaking point, you're already at it.

This comes from where I love rather from where I hate. 

Consanguinity;

Generation-worth of ice(eyes) turned into fiasco. For power generators that fall beneath kingdoms whose maps are frescos. Mortals are cavity-wall-murals and you aren’t immune to them.

Heartbeats are bullets that become pellets against machine guns. The shelling is aimed at your shelter. You are overexposed at gunpoint, but the smog is making it hard to see. They say, by now, you would’ve seen beyond the glitter, but that’s what it’s like when you play mind tricks on yourself.

You can revolutionize your scars, but pain isn’t forever. I’ve grown twice your size sliding between your hands; I know their skin isn’t turning into leather. Not anytime soon. 

I know it is drawing on your breath, but you are more alive now than you ever will be. Remember that you are the bass in your ears, wild inside your ribcage.

You are free like that.

You are free like flat notes leaving the opera house, untraceable.

Floating in the night sky like Nebula, envied by clusters.

You are the little between violins and violas; the few that get you are miraculous, having the honor to scribe your ashes and to scrub off your dust.

Maybe the reason you never give your best is because you’re afraid you might give it all, and never have it in return. You never give, and thereby never lose.

This is the closest to flue your mind will ever be, you’re burning out, and we aren’t out of electricity.

The buzz is acid down the drain, heroin pumps in your veins. Blood has fled your vessels.

Superheroes are the sum of an imagination, do not justify your last vivid hope; bring it to life.

It is all imaginary, and so is forever. But we’re both too young to know about that.

All that you’ve done, you’ve done by your own, and you’ve run far to tell.

Thrill-seekers are drills to the bottom of Earth.

Your curse will ricochet back at you; don’t get too comfortable.

Dodge the names, if you will, and plant them under your soles. The call is yours to wreck the train.

You’ve got five fingers for a reason; each for a sister, you can’t sustain on your own. Stop sleeping to roars like footsteps against these vicious bricks. 

Don’t drop your lucky penny to thud into a fortuneteller who confessed to you your quest. Don’t push them off.

Build a fort, in terms of paper.

Because we agreed to disagree, aiming for safer.

The Kiddie Pool;

Here's to the part where I write badly edited spoken word poetry:

Absolute evil does not exist in this world. A few stains of innocence will always smudge the view; somehow, innocence isn't always pure.

Somehow, relevance hasn't got a clue.

Even if you evacuate the scene, a few drops of nonsense can purify the most elaborate loops.

You can tumble along the hallway, wrap my door, knock my bones, twist my knuckles, because their white is too honest and you can't bear casualties anymore.

I am not your crest; your target's way beneath my head; it can do nothing but kill me. My hell is not your Eden.

Even if I confuse the lot of my being, I won't bleach the dirt at my feet, preach what tics the clock. 

It takes too much dishonesty to distinguish distrust.

From West Amman until your pebbles trundle the fortune of breaking sticks for legs and stones for clones. Stones are bricks that pause the downfall, of the city that lasts. City on gunpowder. City that laughs. City that flounders over guests and cats.

I am clinging on each reason to stay. So don't cut the ropes; I carry your heart.

The tremble in me is sparked enough to sleepwalk. Don't you dare call me weak, when I've been losing sleep trying not to sleep-talk. Clutching my fists behind my back because I didn't want dreams to last.

All I know of fear; is that it is further from a black eye. A walk through the rasps, begging for the quiet.

Aphrodite would've made it out filthy and wealthy, cursing at the bolts. 

Put on a wreath of shame, crucified underneath your skin, praying you would grow out of your deeds. 

I halt despite the fact that I am yet to discover my company. The fervent rush at the end, seeking revenge in violent spit, spilled at gunpoint. Frantic pleas, or in lieu of them, quivering bliss. I tighten my hold around the words left unsaid, lost in clenched jaws and claws for interlocked grips. Crooked teeth sharing entries to diaries. Secrets are not so secretory once they collide. Chaps still fight, cry, lie for the best. Hang on best, even though the damage is done and consent is in resistance, when a portion of you leaves your body, it can't but slither lusciously into the possibilities. Gone. Forever.

I don't need you to save me. I belong to the demons; at least they talk to me.

I am only redeemed by my stutter. My beam isn't my shelter. 

Shallow thoughts are meant to surface.

I let my feet create my land, free enough to stiffen my thorns.

Father Sorrow,

Until you give up your throne, don't chant from above. 

15

My imagination is the gutter

My vision is in white.

Gratification is for suckers

Down with dignity --

I am fooled by heights.